KC: Once you’ve created a pose for each of those characters, what is the next step?

SM: The next step is setting what you would consider to be normal key poses. Just an overall road map of where I want the scene to go. Both spatially, where they are going to start and finish within the confines of the frame, as well as emotionally. This is where I’d start establishing that change of emotion if there is one. So focusing on Mr. Stout in the scene, we first see him as he’s about to take a bite of the peanut. Stuart asks Mr. Stout why they didn’t want him, and Mr. Stout pulls his attention away from the peanut to answer him. Then he goes into delivering his sob story. Some of the key extremes would be the pose where he’s about to bite the peanut, the poses where he looks at Stuart and his mind is scrambling to come up with the sob story and a few poses of extremes, such as pointing at Stuart with the peanut to accent a word and slumping over, covering his face in shame at the end of the scene.

At this point I’m still not really worrying about movement. Of course, I’m keeping it in mind, but the actual movement of the character is focused on later, at the point where I’m doing breakdowns.

Mr. Stout thinks of an excuse.

KC: When you are setting these poses, are you keying facial features, fingers, everything?

SM: At this point, I usually included all of the details in the pose. If it was a more action-oriented scene, I probably wouldn’t. However, in a subtle acting situation I definitely do.

KC: Would you show this stage of the shot to your supervisor or the director?

SM: I actually start doing some breakdowns before showing it. I want to get some idea of the timing in addition to just the emotion. I’ll bring it to a point where it’s clear what I’m going for. That’s actually a pretty important thing. A lot of people show scenes at a point where the lead or animation director has to ask, “Where are you with this scene?” or “What is it you’re trying to get across here?” and the animator has to explain what is and isn’t done yet. I don’t think that’s the best time to show a scene.

KC: I might disagree there a bit. If you are dealing with a director or supervisor who has trouble projecting what they might want, you can often get some information by showing them anything. I’ve had several directors who wouldn’t tell you what they wanted until you put a roughed-out scene in front of them. You didn’t want to invest a lot of time producing an idea that was incompatible with the director’s vision.

Mr. Stout looks away in shame.

SM: A director like that’s going to be difficult to work with no matter how you work. I would personally always tend to lean toward not showing something you have to explain. I’ve found that it leaves the scene too open to interpretation and then you risk the chance of being directed along a totally different path before your ideas have been given a real chance to prove themselves. And really, setting your keys and adding some breakdowns shouldn’t take that long to do. For example, the scene I’m working on now in Stu2 is 95 frames long. Between keys and breakdowns, I probably had no more than about 9 or 10 poses and it only took a few hours to rough out. That’s when I showed it for the first time. I agree with you on the idea of not investing too much time in a scene before showing it to whomever you need to show it to.